


and the town lit up and the world got still

by stelleappese



Category: Buzzfeed: Worth It (Web Series)
Genre: M/M, Pining, Road Trips, Sharing a Bed, that's uh basically it lol
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-12
Updated: 2019-12-12
Packaged: 2021-02-25 22:27:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,520
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21772927
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stelleappese/pseuds/stelleappese
Summary: “We could drive,” Steven suggests with a shrug.Andrew sighs. “That’s so dumb,” he says, turning around and starting to walk away.
Relationships: Andrew Ilnyckyj/Steven Lim
Comments: 14
Kudos: 85
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	and the town lit up and the world got still

**Author's Note:**

  * For [jamesbonds](https://archiveofourown.org/users/jamesbonds/gifts).



> I'd like to thank my beta [lannamichaels](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lannamichaels/profile) for giving me the perspective I needed to finish this fic :)

“Guess we’ll have to sit on the floor for nine hours,” Andrew mutters, as he and Steven stand side by side and watch Adam enter the gate to board the plane to LA.  
From what they managed to gather, bad weather had something to do with their sudden landing in the middle of nowhere just a couple of hours after their flight left New York. The fact they had to engage in a brutal game of rock, paper, scissors (which Adam silently won) to decide who would get to fly back home, though, seems to be the consequence of a convergence of bad luck, technical issues, and overbooked flights.  
“We could drive,” Steven suggests with a shrug.  
Andrew sighs. “That’s so dumb,” he says, turning around and starting to walk away.

There is a little voice in the back of Steven’s head that tell him Andrew probably hates him, right now. For dragging them to New York, maybe, or just. In general.  
He knows, objectively, that he’s probably just exhausted and annoyed by the fact they’re stranded, but he still can’t help wondering whether Andrew is annoyed by the fact he’s stranded _with Steven_.

Five hours later, their flight has been postponed another two times, the few cafes in the whole little airport have been raided by hungry travelers, and the child who just finished screeching has started crying again. That’s when Andrew jumps up like a spring, grabs his bags and backpack, and marches away leaving Steven scrambling to follow him.

“Where are you going?” Steven asks, once he’s managed to catch up to him.  
“We’re renting a car,” Andrew says, “Can’t be that bad, right? We’re, what?, halfway there? We can be back in LA in a couple of days _and_ we’ll be the fuck out of here.”  
“Ok,” Steven says, “Can you slow down, though?”

Andrew stops, but the way he flinches when the crying child lets out a particularly high-pitched scream, the way he screws his eyes shut and grimaces, makes Steven give up on trying to convince him to wait a few more hours.

*

After the bright, artificial lights of the airport, Steven is almost surprised to find out how dark it is outside. It’s not a thick darkness, though; night hasn’t fallen yet: the sun is just blocked out by fat, gray clouds. The light has an eerie quality to it; it’s the same kind of filtered, dim light that would seep through the makeshift tents Steven and his sister would make out of blankets propped on chairs when they were children.

It takes Andrew approximately fifteen minutes after they set off to fall asleep, arms crossed, trying to curl up on himself as much as the seat belt will allow him to. Five or so minutes later, they drive through a particularly active stretch of highway, and light explodes all around them: billboards and passing cars and blinking neon signs. 

As Steven is waiting for the sudden burst of traffic to dissipate, he steals a look at Andrew’s sleeping form: his profile is haloed in the golden light of the cars behind him; the red-and-white lights from the cars in front of them make the shadows on Andrew’s face (on his nose and his lips and his fine, long eyelashes) dance. He doesn’t look grumpy or annoyed, anymore. He looks so peaceful.

For some reason, it takes a considerable amount of effort on Steven’s part to just tear his eyes away from him.

*

When the rain comes, it’s relentless and heavy, but not enough to wake Andrew up.  
Steven tries to power through it for a while, but it eventually gets to the point he can barely see the cars in front of him, so he slows down to a crawl until he spots a rest stop.

He’s getting hungry, by now, but he doesn’t want to leave Andrew alone, so he sits back and waits, watching the rain fall. 

Everything is muffled, around them; the drumming of the rain against the car, the whirring of the windshield wipers, the whooshing sound of cars passing by on the road. The world beyond Andrew, on the other side of the window, is a blurry, watery mess of brown and green and gray; the fragile light that has managed to get past the barricade of clouds projects shivering raindrops onto Andrew’s face and hair and sweatshirt.

It’s only when the rolling thunders turn into crackling ones that Andrew wakes up. He doesn’t seem startled, but he’s immediately almost completely awake, blinking hard and looking around as if he were unsure where he is.

“Jesus,” Andrew says, unbuckling his seat belt and looking at the wobbly world outside their car. “It’s really coming down.”  
“Yeah,” Steven says. Or he thinks he says. Maybe he’s too hungry, or he’s possibly getting too tired himself, because he’s starting to feel… strange. Definitely disoriented, but also, and he has no idea why, uncomfortable. He’s been trying to dig around his brain for a while, trying to locate the reason why he would feel like that, but he hasn’t been successful so far.

They both go quiet for a long time, watching as lightning bolts bloom, incandescent and made wiggly by the rain pouring down the windshield, against the horizon.

*

Later on, after the rain died down a little bit, they make a run for the building in the middle of the rest area. The clock hanging behind the counter tells Steven it’s around 8pm, but he’s not entirely sure time has worked properly since they left the airport anyway. 

The building is pretty evenly split between a convenience store and a little restaurant, and when Steven gets back from a quick trip to the bathroom, he finds Andrew sitting at a table, squinting at a magazine.

“I’m getting scrambled eggs and bacon,” he announces, without looking away from the magazine.  
“Must be breakfast time somewhere, right?” Steven grins, grabbing the menu, and he feels way too relieved when Andrew grins back at him.  
“I saw a motel sign, outside. Should be right down the road.” Andrew tells Steven, “It wouldn’t be a bad idea to spend the night there. This rain doesn’t seem to want to stop any time soon.”  
“Sure,” Steven says. 

They’ve just received their food when Andrew says: “Listen, I’m sorry about earlier.”

He says it poking at his eggs and looking at an undefined spot on the table.  
“What for?”  
“Sometimes being around people feels like too much, for me.” Andrew shrugs. “It’s like my brain gets overloaded, you know.”

Steven doesn’t, not really. He _likes_ having people around, even when it’s a noisy crowd like the one they left behind at the airport. When he was still in school, he used to go study in cafes and parks exclusively for the background noise, for the chattering people, the noises from the kitchen, the passing cars, the barking dogs. He could never get anything done in the library.  
But he still nods and shrugs.

“You don’t need to apologize, man, it’s cool.”  
“Just know I wasn’t being rude.” Andrew says, then hesitates, “Well, I wasn’t being rude _this time_ . Most of the times I was rude in New York were on purpose.”  
“Fair enough.” Steven says.  
“You can be annoying.”  
“Yes, I can.”  
“Well, that didn’t sound threatening at all.” Andrew laughs.

And, completely out of nowhere, Steven’s brain helpfully offers him something he’d never thought before: Andrew looks incredibly cute when he smiles like that, bright and unguarded.

*

“What exactly did you tell them?” Andrew asks after they’ve opened the door to their motel room and are faced with a single, king size bed.  
“I, uh,” Steven says, clearing his throat, “I said we’d take whatever they had available.”  
“Great. That’s, hm. That’ great. Do you ever wonder if anything we try to do will ever go according to plan?”  
“That’s the beauty of it, dude!” Steven says. “Life is unpredictable.”  
“I was going to say ‘a bitch,’ but I guess that works too.” Andrew shrugs, letting himself fall on the bed. “I once had a girlfriend who kicked and punched people in her sleep,” he says, staring at the ceiling, “I do hope you don’t do that.”  
“Not that I know of.” Steven says, and wonders why on earth his face has suddenly grown hot.

By the time Steven comes out of the shower, Andrew has buried himself in bed and seems fast asleep again. Steven briefly wonders _how_ , considering the storm is still raging outside: a door keeps slamming violently somewhere nearby, the lights flicker, the window-panes tremble.

Steven turns off the lights. He considers watching some tv, but he finds himself staring at the shadows dancing on the ceiling instead, at the pinkish light from the vacancy sign outside being drowned in the white-hot flash of lightning.

He turns and looks at the bump of Andrew’s body.  
There is absolutely no way he’ll manage to fall asleep.

Except he does.

It’s a light, frustrating kind of sleep; he wakes up often, would like to change position, but he’s worried he’ll disturb Andrew’s sleep. In the morning, his lower back and neck hurt, his eyes feel dry and full of sand, and Andrew is not in bed next to him.

Steven groans, tries to blink the burning in his eyes away.

There’s a picture in his head, and he’s not sure if he dreamed it or saw it during one of his numerous short bursts of waking up during the night: Andrew, sitting under the window, chin in hand, looking out at the falling rain; the neon sign painting his features pink as it blinked on and off.

“Morning,” Andrew says, walking in, almost making Steven jump out of his skin. “It’s still raining, but not as hard as last night. I got coffee and some donuts.” he holds up the paper bag for Steven to see.

*

They get going late, so they’re still reasonably awake when night comes, and keep pushing forward for a while. The rain goes away, then comes back, then goes away. There’s some ancient song playing on the radio, something from maybe 2004 or 2005. The rain, now, feels like a caress, it’s just murmuring soothingly against the car.

Time, Steven realizes during the second day of their drive, loses all meaning when you’re on the road. He feels as if he’s been driving for a lifetime, but at the same time, he may as well have started five minutes before. Sometimes, as they’re driving down the highway, time seems to dilate, like a rubber band being tugged from both sides. From time to time, they drive through clusters of buildings, little towns that have grown out of their boundaries and surrounded the highway, and the moment they do that, the burst of light coming from all directions, the myriad of lit windows, the implied lives being lived on the other side of them, make whoever’s holding the rubber band let go for a second, and it snaps into its original form.

“What did your girlfriend say about our impromptu adventure?” Steven asks, as they leave yet another nameless city behind and plunge back into the darkness.  
“She said I’m an idiot,” Andrew answers. “Yours?”  
“Oh.” Steven answers.  
“Oh?” Andrew asks, giving him a look. “She said ‘oh’?”  
“No. I, uh. I don’t know what she says.”  
“Haven’t you told her?”  
“We… broke up?”  
Andrew blinks at him. “Oh.” he says, then giggles at his own tone, grimaces at his own giggling, and says: “Sorry, man.”  
“It’s ok.” Steven shrugs. “It was amicable.”  
They go quiet for a few minutes, then Andrew says: “Wait, but weren’t you together like… two weeks ago?”  
“Yeah, we broke up right before the trip.” 

Andrew is still looking at him in a weird way, but he doesn’t ask any more questions; he just frowns at the horizon. 

*

They’re three days into the trip when Andrew’s eyes go wide and he whispers, breathlessly: “Dude, pull over a minute…”

Steven was too focused on driving to really pay attention. He noticed the woods and towns had disappeared, that the landscape around them had become completely flat, but he doesn’t notice the sky until he follows Andrew out of the car and looks up.

It’s like at some point, while he was driving, the sky had suddenly acquired _depth_. Big, puffy white clouds march through the blinding blueness of it, and Steven isn’t sure he’s ever been able to tell with such precision how layered they are, how very far away some are from them.

“That’s so cool,” Andrew says, squinting at the sky, one of his bright smiles plastered to his face.

Maybe an hour later, they’re both sitting on the still-warm hood of the car, looking at the ever-changing sky, the radio singing in the background.

“We should probably get going,” Andrew says, not moving a muscle.  
“Yeah,” Steven answers, and to be fair, he really does think of hopping down, but doesn’t. Instead, he sits up, hugs his knees, rests his chin on his arms, and says: “Do you think I’m weird?”  
“Absolutely,” Andrew chuckles.  
“Is it weird that I don’t feel bad for breaking up with my girlfriend?” he asks. He doesn’t look at Andrew, he looks at the seemingly never-ending horizon.  
“Every relationship is different, dude.” Andrew says, and his voice sounds _different_ . He doesn’t sound as snarky and flat as he usually does; he sounds gentler, softer.  
“I don’t think I’m good with that stuff.”  
“That’s strange, coming from you.”  
“That sounds a lot like you’re saying I’m a, uh, man of ill repute.” Steven comments, with a laugh.  
“I didn’t mean _that_ !” Andrew snorts, “I meant you’re very open with your feelings. You know. I think it mostly has to do with the fact you have absolutely no fucking brain-to-mouth filter, though.”  
“Yeah,” Steven chuckles, “Well. Your filter works way too well, and you still have a girlfriend.”  
“To be honest, I don’t know how that happened.”  
“That’s my problem! I never know if I like someone as a friend or as something else,” Steven says, sitting up. “How can you tell? It feels the same!”  
“Not really…”  
“I mean, falling in love and falling in… friendship. It feels the same.”  
“Doesn’t feel the same to me,” Andrew shrugs. “Well. It sorta does? The whole ‘falling in’ part is kinda similar, because you want to spend a lot of time with the person in question, and you really want them to think you’re cooler than you actually are.”  
“Yeah!”  
“But there’s no… I don’t know what to call it, honestly.” Andrew bites at the inside of his cheek, he frowns, “I want to say ‘hunger’ but… not really. But close enough, I guess. That sort of… gnawing feeling of emptiness in your stomach.”  
“That’s a thing?” Steven asks.  
Andrew gives him a look. “You’ve never felt that?”  
“What, like. Butterflies in your stomach?”  
“Nah, that’s just fluttering. What I’m talking about is fucking painful, dude.”  
“Really?”  
“Really.”  
“Ah.” Steven flops down again, arms behind his head, losing himself in the cloud again.

*

“If we wake up early, we’ll be back in LA by tomorrow evening,” Andrew says, from the other side of the room. He’s sitting sideways on his own bed, his back to the wall, his phone lighting up his face with a blueish hue.  
“We’re not gonna wake up early,” Steven snorts, from under his pile of blankets.  
“Not with that attitude, we won’t,” Andrew teases him. 

It feels, to Steven, as if time hasn’t worked properly for the whole duration of their journey so far.

How long have they been on the road, anyway? It feels like a whole month and a single afternoon at the same time. Their evening alone lasted a couple of days from beginning to end; they ate breakfast food for a dinner that seemed to last six hours, drove in the darkness for twelve hours (or, as Steven’s watch insisted, maybe just four;) but their stop at a rest area later on, that one lasted only a second, if it even ever happened at all (the only thing Steven has to prove they were there is an half-eaten packet of M&Ms and the mental image of Andrew squinting at sweets under the neon light.)

“What is it?” Andrew asks, “Don’t you feel like going home?”  
“And face all the work we need to catch up with? I’m psyched.” Steven dead-pans.

But it’s not that. He thinks. No, he’s pretty sure of it.

He doesn’t know why, not yet, but Andrew did guess right: Steven doesn’t want to go home.  
He’s got this strange, unnamable feeling, like there’s something he still has to do, something he needs to find, before he steps foot back in LA, in the office, before he faces his coworkers and friends.

“Andrew.”  
“Yeah?”  
“Never mind. Goodnight.”  
“Night.”

  
  


*

  
  


They do not wake up early. But they do wake up earlier than Steven thought they would.

It’s hard to feel unsettled and misplaced when the sun is high and there are no shadows for his thoughts to hide in. By the time they stop for lunch, way after noon, they’re almost back in a territory Steven can recognize.

“Google maps says we’re six hours away from LA,” Andrew says, munching on french fries. “If we hurry, we’ll be back in LA by midnight. That way, nobody will be able to say it took us a whole week to do this.”  
“Just six days, uh?”  
“Five,” Andrew says, and gives him a strange, inquisitive look.  
“Right.”

It’s suddenly very clear, to Steven, that Andrew knows something is up with him. 

The only problem is Steven doesn’t _know_ what’s going on with him. He can name some of the things that are happening inside his head (he’s reluctant to go home, he’s so tired he feels it in his bones,) but there are some things he’s been examining for the past few days, and he still can’t figure out. The most accurate way he can describe it is as discomfort. Like a pebble in his shoe, a hard spring in his mattress. Something that stings, leaves his ribs sore and tender. He’s grabbed that feeling with both his hands, pinned it down like a butterfly, tore it open to look at all of the pieces that composed it; he’s spent most of the nights during this trip examining it as deeply as he could as he stared at the ceiling and tried to force himself to sleep. He still doesn’t know what it is.

Maybe that’s what he needs to figure out before they get home.

Because something tells him the moment the landscape becomes familiar, the moment his muscle memory takes over and he follows the roads he drives through every day, that feeling is going to burrow somewhere deep inside his brain and stay there, out of reach, still without a name.

“Are you all right?” Andrew asks.  
“Uh? Yeah, I’m cool.” Steven shrugs, with an apologetic smile.

*

They’ve only been back on the road for a couple of hours when Andrew goes: “Dude. Dude, stop for a sec.” 

He looks out of the window with his green eyes wide open and fixated on something, and Steven, as he pulls over, thinks he looks like a cat about to pounce on something. Andrew walks out of the car, and Steven follows him a few steps out into the flat, dry field beside the road.  
“What is it?” he asks, following Andrew’s eyes on a tree a few yards away from them.

The leaves of the tree, he realizes, are black and blue. He blinks hard, trying to figure out how that can possibly be, takes a few steps forward. In a matter of seconds, Steven’s eyes recognize what he’s looking at, and dozens, if not hundreds, of birds all take flight at the same time, making the naked branches of the tree they were sitting on bounce as they’re freed of their weight. 

Steven hops back one step, looks up at the black and blue flock as it rises like a wave, and just like a wave it shifts and ripples, as fluid as the shivering of ears of wheat in a field on a windy day. He hears Andrew laugh, and when he turns to look at him he finds him almost vibrating with excitement, his eyes shining as he looks at the birds, one of those rare, bright, unrestrained smiles of his painted on his lips.  
“Holy _shit_!” he says, then he looks as if he’s about to say something else, but he just laughs again instead.

The chirping, which exploded all of a sudden and was almost deafening, seems to disappear behind the ringing in Steven’s ears.

He looks at the pure, unadulterated awe on Andrew’s face, and feels like something inside his chest is swelling up, pushing, threatening to spill out. And then, here it is: that piercing, throbbing, aching _void_ inside Steven’s stomach.

*

During the next four hours, Steven doesn’t say a word.

It’s not that he’s lacking them, either. His head is filled to the brim with words, with questions, declarations; all of them tangled, crashing into one another, morphing into a continuous buzz. He can feel them coiled inside his throat, and though he can’t swallow them down, he can’t let them out either: his mouth refuses to open, his lips are pressed together, his jaw clamped shut.

They are, according to Andrew’s phone, around one hour from the exit for LA. Andrew is throwing stuff inside his backpack, making sure he’s not forgetting anything, when Steven pulls over, turns off the engine, and gets out of the car. 

The night is chilly, the desert around them completely quiet. In the distance, flashing between the mountains, Steven can see the luminous halo of Los Angeles glow. So close. Close enough, Steven knows perfectly well he wouldn’t even feel the hour he still needs to drive to get there; time would disappear into thin air, and he’d be back in his empty apartment, and Andrew would be back home, sneaking into bed as quietly as he can so as not to wake his girlfriend.

“Hey,” Andrew says, gently squeezing Steven’s arm. “Are you all right?”  
“I can’t.” Steven blurts out. “Go home. I can’t do it.”  
“Ok,” Andrew says, “Ok, uhm.”  
“I’m sorry,” Steven whispers, then shuts his mouth and looks away. There are tears prickling at the corners of his eyes. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”  
“It’s ok. We can, hm. Let’s just wait here for a bit.”  
“I’m sorry, I… couldn’t breathe, in the car.”  
“Don’t worry about it, buddy.” Andrew says, “Just breathe. There’s no rush.”

Steven doesn’t know exactly how long they stay there, standing quietly next to each other. He knows that, at one point, Andrew guides him back to the car, and for the first time during the whole trip, Steven finds himself in the passenger seat.  
“God, I hate this,” he hears Andrew murmur, as he very slowly makes his way down the road, sitting up straight and tense. Cars zoom past them, occasionally blasting the horn as they do.

Andrew only drives the couple of miles necessary for them to bump into a motel, but once he parks the car, he flops against the seat, breathes out deeply, and closes his eyes for a moment.

“Sorry,” Steven says, but Andrew shoos away his apology with his hand, and once he’s done that, he reaches out and rests his hand on Steven’s shoulder. He leaves it there for what feels like a long time. When Andrew finally gets out of the car to go book them a room, Steven’s shoulder feels cold without Andrew touching him.

The motel they ended up at is blindingly bright remnant of the sixties. Their room is filled with deep orange accents; one whole wall is painted orange, the curtains are orange, the pillows are orange, the sink cabinet is orange. Steven’s bed is too hard to be comfortable, but once he’s let himself plop on it, he can’t find it in himself to get up. He suddenly feels so immensely heavy, he feels like it would take him such a massive effort to move his limbs alone, let alone his entire body.

After a while, Andrew sits down on the edge of Steven’s bed. He stays there for a moment, then lies down next to Steven, shoulder to shoulder.  
“Do you want to talk about it?” he asks.  
“I want to,” Steven hears himself say.  
“Ok.”  
“But I can’t.”  
“Ok.”

A group of people walk past their door; there’s the sound of heels clicking on the floor, of laughter, cheerful chattering. Someone in the room next to theirs is watching tv, and the muffled voice of a news anchor makes its way to them through the thin walls.

“If you change your mind, I’m here.” Andrew says. “I don’t know how helpful I can be, but, you know. I can listen. They say talking to someone about things makes you feel better.”  
“They do say that,” Steven says, “Not sure why, though.”  
“Yeah,” Andrew sighs, “I’m not sure either.” 

Steven wakes up before dawn, fully dressed, all tangled up with Andrew. He’s holding on tightly, his head on Andrew’s chest, one arm possessively wrapped around him. There’s a little voice in the back of Steven’s mind that tells him he should probably move, but he’s still heavy with sleep, and the only thing he wants is to close his eyes and stay like this for a little longer. Andrew is hugging him as well, his steady breath puffing against the top of Steven’s hair, making shivers run down his spine.

He’s almost given in and closed his eyes again when Andrew starts waking up; he sighs, stretches a little, runs his hand up and down Steven’s back. Even when he rolls on his back, he still doesn’t entirely break contact with Steven.  
“Morning,” he says, with a tiny, sleepy smile.

They breakfast on vending machine sweets in the early morning chill, the dome of the sky reflecting the palest of lights, the sun still hidden somewhere beyond the horizon. Neither of them speaks for the longest time, but there’s no real tension in the air. The vague hint of embarrassment in Steven’s mind occasionally peeks through, but it’s insubstantial, a distant whisper.

They’re walking back to their room, the sun now peeping through the mountains behind them, when Steven hears himself say: “I think we can go home, now.”

*

“Are you going to be ok?” Andrew asks, while Steven is rummaging in his backpack for his house keys.  
“Yeah. I don’t know what got into me,” Steven murmurs, apologetically.  
“Breakups are never easy,” Andrew says, with a shrug. “I get it.”  
“Uh?” Steven frowns, keys in hand.  
“I mean, even if it wasn’t a bad breakup, it was probably still stressful. Plus, you drove for hours every day for almost a week. You must have been exhausted.”  
“Ah,” Steven says, “Yeah. Sure.”  
“Unless… something else happened?” Andrew asks, tilting his head a little, green eyes studying Steven’s expression.

And Steven, who is a horrible, horrible liar, opens his mouth to say ‘no,’ but snaps it shut instead without having said a word. 

He looks at his hands as he fidgets with his keys.

“You don’t need to tell me,” Andrew says, “Just tell me if I need to worry.”  
“You don’t need to worry,” Steven says, “I’ll figure this out.”

Steven forces himself to look up at Andrew, and he means to just prove he’s cool, he’s nowhere near the brink of freaking the fuck out. What happens, though, is that he stares right into Andrew’s eyes, and Andrew seems to look right through him; he seems to rummage around, examine Steven’s deepest thoughts, and from the small questioning twitch of Andrew's eyebrows, from the way his lips part slightly, Steven is almost sure he managed to guess precisely what’s going on inside his head.

“Steven, listen…”  
“I’ll see you at the office, ok?” Steven says.  
Andrew hesitates, then nods.  
“See you there,” he says, and Steven thinks he’s going to walk away just like that; instead he takes a step forward and squeezes Steven in a tight hug that lingers just a second more than strictly necessary. “Take care,” Andrew says, before he lets go of him.

*

  
  


Monday feels real.

It may be because Steven wakes up in his own bed, has his usual breakfast, drives his own car to work; because he spends the day surrounded by familiar faces, well-established inside jokes, the usual routine of a day in the office.

His brain almost tricks him into thinking everything is back to normal: it had been the road, the rain, the murmuring music in the background, the way time had gone as thick as honey during the journey back to LA. That had been the problem. Not Steven. Not Andrew.

Except when he finally glimpses Andrew, around lunch-time, his stomach twitches painfully and his heart starts racing.

“You ok, man?” Ryan, who was walking with Steven to get something to eat, asks.  
Steven doesn’t answer. He just starts walking faster.

The day takes a new, absurd shape. Steven catches himself tip-toeing around, carefully studying rooms before he walks into them, looking around nervously. He’s vaguely aware of the fact what he’s doing is completely irrational, but he feels like there is a very good chance the world will implode, crumble onto itself and fall into pieces, if he finds himself face to face with Andrew.

Luckily, Steven has a lot of work to do: he catches up on all the things he didn’t do during the past week, spends a few hours planning something with Ryan and Shane, exchanges emails and phone calls with restaurants he’s thinking of visiting for Worth It. When Quinta needs to leave early and asks him if he’s got the time to help her quickly brainstorm something, Steven happily agrees to help. When Rie needs someone to taste two versions of something she’s cooked and tell her which one is better, Steven immediately abandons his desk and follows her.

The office is almost completely empty when Steven finally feels he can safely leave. He puts on his jacket, waves at the few people still sitting at their desks, and he’s just pulled out his car keys from his pocket when he walks outside and finds Andrew leaning against the wall near the exit.

“Hey,” Andrew says.  
“Hey.” Steven answers, frozen in place a few feet from him.  
“You hungry?” Andrew asks, and Steven has the weird, absurd feeling he’s being asked something else entirely.  
“I could eat.” Steven says, gingerly.  
“Yeah?”  
It’s only after Steven nods that Andrew pushes himself away from the wall and walks to the middle of the path, waiting for Steven to reach him.

It’s a strange walk, compared to what they’re used to; to the back-and-forth of dumb jokes and even dumber puns, to the teasing, the giggling. Steven lets Andrew guide him down the street, then around the corner.  
“I was thinking of getting some pizza,” Andrew says, and his tone is guarded, tight, almost as distant as it used to be before they started working on Worth It together, before they became friends.  
“Pizza’s fine.” Steven offers, almost frowning at the sheer _hopefulness_ that seeps through his tone. “I like pizza.”

Could it be that Andrew figured it out? Could it be that he’s angry at Steven? Maybe he feels betrayed, thinks Steven had ulterior motives from the beginning. Maybe he’s taking him out for dinner just so that he can tell him off, make it clear he’s completely uninterested to Steven’s stupid crush.

They slow down as they approach a red light, and Steven’s entire body is rebelling against him reaching the pizza place, his brain is filling up with possible excuses to offer Andrew so that he can just turn around and run back to the office, to his car, to some place safe and away from any looming confrontation.

He’s so deep inside his own mind, he almost flinches when Andrew’s knuckles brush against his. Steven goes still, doesn’t dare turn to look at him. Hesitantly, at first, Andrew’s hand sneaks against Steven’s, his fingers prying Steve’s apart and intertwining with them.

The light turns green. The few people around them cross the street, but they don’t move.

Steven’s heart is firmly lodged in his throat as he dares to look at Andrew, whose eyes are still fixed on the floor in front of him, and who, very slowly, shoots Steven a hesitant, almost guilty little look.

The light turns red. Cars start moving again, projecting waves of light against them, turning Andrew’s eyes from dark and inscrutable to pale and almost painfully vulnerable. And it’s in Andrew’s eyes that Steven first glimpses the smile that’s about to bloom on his face after Steven firmly squeezes Andrew’s hand.

**Author's Note:**

> To the person this fic is for: I hope you enjoyed it! :)  
> Happy holidays! :D


End file.
